The Internet provides ubiquitous connectivity that is quick, open, and enables clear communication and exchange of ideas. Unfortunately, the Internet is not secure enough for many confidential, proprietary exchanges that occur within private networks such as those maintained by corporations, schools, governmental agencies, and the like.
A private network (e.g., a corporate network) utilizes encryption to create a protected network that is secure. However, a private network is not open enough and instead creates barriers to agility. In particular, services within a private network are routed and accessed by point-to-point connections that are customized for each service. When changes need to be made to how services are provisioned and/or when new services need to be offered, there is no central place to advertise or manage access to the changes and/or new services. There is also no consistent way to connect users to each service in a secure, reliable and easy-to-provision way.
Today, in large corporations, there are tens of thousands of servers that function as hard-wired and hand-configured components. Under this scenario, it is very difficult to connect together a system that provides adequate speed, security, agility, and extensibility. In particular, this network configuration makes organizing cross-connectivity and integration across groups of people in a corporation challenging.
Moreover, network processes in private networks are implemented manually and in an ad-hoc way using information technology (IT) systems for performing steps such as defining, designing, procuring, building, developing, testing, promoting, certifying, and launching physical servers, network connectivity, and/or security capabilities. To implement these processes, conventional networks within an organization such as a corporation include tightly coupled layers of network components, manual configurations, and/or embedded code.
Increasingly, businesses need the ability to deploy IT systems in a fast, robust, secure, and extensible way. Moreover, services within and across business domains need to be connected in a governed and agile way.
Therefore, there is a need for a network implementation that would allow network components within a private network (e.g., corporate network, and the like) to have the same ease of connectivity as the Internet but also allow the ability to enforce policies and security as in a private network